Thebes is a bunker, a war room with glazed offices where generals, aides and civil servants crowd round a screen. A siege is over, an enemy defeated but peace precarious. Thebes revolves majestically, to show its blank outer wall (weirdly echoing the National Theatre building, actually, as if Sir Denys Lasdun had left a couple of loads of unused concrete). Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, is a defiant teenager in ankle socks trying to persuade her sister to help to bury the body of their rebel brother in religious ritual, defying King Creon’s orders to let him rot in the open.
Polly Findlay, working with Don Taylor’s new translation, is not the first to bring a modern sensibility, political and feminist, to Sophocles’s grim conclusion of the Oedipus tragedy. Every decade has pinned its own preoccupations on to the rebellious Antigone and the pitiless, doctrinaire dictator Creon. Politics, militarism, family, doomed young love and parental grief never date.
But this 21st-century interpretation burns particularly hard into our age. Costume and scene remind us of what we know too well in the age of Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad, especially after this week’s appalling news from Syria. It’s not about togas and robes: superstitious, stubborn, paranoid tyrants whose word is death have suits and ties and CCTV and bustling modern offices, and look just like our own leaders.
Indeed, when Christopher Eccleston’s Creon has sent his niece to her death and listens impatiently to Tiresias’s prophecy of doom, he lounges and glares like a PM losing patience with a particularly tiresome special adviser. The choral comments are modern too, if stylised: just spoken versions of the silent doubts and observations that any ministers and aides suffer in a regime that sacrifices humanity to harsh crisis-management.
Thus Findlay takes you straight in across the millennia. Which is not to say that any faithful translation of Sophocles is ever easy: Greek tragedies bereft of their poetry easily become clunky at times, repetitive. Jodie Whittaker is a passionate Antigone, Luke Norris does a fine squaddie turn as the Soldier and Luke Newberry is a touching Haemon. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith deals brilliantly with the classically difficult third-party messenger’s description of the deaths.
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But Eccleston’s Creon is the most curious, ultimately gripping performance. At first a chunky crop-haired politico, he seems appropriately wooden and bereft of feeling. But as doubt of his own rightness assails him he warms into vulnerability and madness. In the ghastly triple denouement his “I am nothing! I want nothing! My last, simplest prayer!” rings chill round the great auditorium.
Box office: 020-7452 3000, to July 21. Production sponsored by Travelex